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Previous Publications

patricides (2006)

Waterloo Sampler No. 4 (2004)

David Pollard
Risk of Skin (2011)

Pollard's intensive, ontological meditations on loss, language and 'the death of God', creativity and the failure of writing, are quite wonderful and wholly unexpected. So we end up with a professional philosopher who lectures in both philosophy and literature and produces his first book of poetry in his sixties - a pretty heady late flowering - there's nobody remotely like him.Simon Jenner

What the critics said about The Poetry of Keats:

It would not be easy to say just how fine this book is - It is precisely such intense poetical thinking that is practiced in the very finest way by Pollard's reading of Keats

John Sallis, Man of World

What I have found emerging most clearly from this fascinating book is a sense of the author's genuine reverence for his subject - something which Keats himself would have recognised and approved

Colin Murry, The British Journal of Aesthetics

ISBN 798-1-906742-30-0

Five years since his stunning debut, patricides, David Pollard returns with a volume showing explosive, protean diversity. Clearly taking up from there, this second collection marks a kind of gimel, the early polyphonic way of showing how harmony enriches by dividing into different voices.
Styles here bounce off each other as if fighting for possession.

A stone-setting of obituaries, history (particularly revolutionary) and the familiar creativity/death nexus, enriches this more peopled collection. The exploration of painting and particularly music is a Pollard keynote. This inner-part voicing — so intense in Pollard and evident in his readings — shouts between the singular line breaks that mark his uniqueness.

In the epistolary sequence which closes the volume, Pollard engages with the Keats circle in a way that reveals a playful historical imagination using spare, accessible language infused with insights. This is an ideal place to access Pollard’s world, over-spilling with sad, individual nuances: a drastic re-visiting of his very honed language which brings us back to loss, distortion and compensation. Faculties, like hearing, tinnitus, or touch, are lost; the music or the turn of the page is all the weight left.

Many poems here are about death — including the death of god — and the absence of the dead for those left behind — paralleled in his extraordinary Perdika pamphlet, bedbound (2011). All of these interact and ride Pollard’s ever more poignant — and frantic — mastery.

Born in 1942 of a long line of rabbis but a critical father, David Pollard has been a furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his three degrees at the University of Sussex.

Pollard is the author of The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience which was his doctoral thesis, The KWIC Concordance to theHarvard Edition of Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and three volumes of poetry. He has been published in learned journals and poetry magazines. A chapbook, bedbound
(Perdika Press) is forth-coming in 2011.